We had about an hours down time this morning due to a fight between a 97 Ford Explorer and one of our old power poles. The pole lost. Well, actually you should have seen the other guy too - what a mess. There were splinters and glass everywhere. But our greedy electric company was their usual prompt self and got us back online in record time with little loss of revenue. I apologize for any inconvenience this must have caused. Thanks.

Here's a real nice article by Stuart Cohen on Businessweek Online exclaiming that SCO's legal maneuvers only made Linux stronger. It states SCO's litigation seemed to bring developers and the community together fighting for the cause. He says "we can thank SCO for helping to move Linux even faster from the fringe of the computer network to the heart of the data center."

This story kinda hits home for me as I now work on a computer all day for cingular wireless (formerly AT&T in our branch). I guess this is why call volume has been increasing steadily lately. Here's the full story on Reuter's slow ass site.

Seems Jason Miller is finding fault in the Linux kernel security bug fix procedure. He goes on and on about security and how security vulnerabilities are handled. Although he mentioned that Gentoo had an accessible security contact, that really didn't apply to things like the underlying kernel. You can read the rest of his article including his thoughts on how to improve the situation here on securityfocus.

A little birdie told me that an update to the acclaimed PCLinuxOS Preview 8 is in the works and possibly due out next week. Details are a bit sketchy at this time, but it seems Tom has been hard at work updating the hardware detection and mklivecd scripts. Now don't get your hopes up, but I hear it might sport a newer 2.6.10 kernel, including patches to fix a little kvm switch problem. Of course it will include all kinds of application updates and other goodies. More on this as it develops.

Mandrake is apparently joining a consortium to help the advancement of what I think of as distributed computing to the point of and what they are terming clustering. Mandrake has a some previous experience in that arena so maybe they can prove to be an asset. Here's a more in depth article on the subject. They want to harness our cpu cycles, and it sounds like for commercial purposes. Show me the money then I say. Until then, I'm looking for aliens.

Woo hoo Gals, this months Cosmopolitan magazine is chocked full of nice tips and tricks to tantalize even the most frigid of geeks. It looks like Ashley Simpson on the cover, but more importantly are the words: The Power of Pre-sex, Beyond Kama Sutra, His Butt, and 50 Ways to Have Fun With Your Man. I can't wait to try some of this stuff on my man!!!

Yep, just what we need, more spam. Apparently they aren't as concerned with hiding from their isps as getting the mail out as they are now just sending it through their isps servers. Read the gory details here.

Have you seen the previews for Vin Diesels's new movie? He is starring in a soon to be released Walt Disney production co-starring five children! I hope all those tattoos in XXX were stick ons! Well, here's a summary of the flick and here's a shot of the promotional poster. Heck anything with Vin Diesel has got be good!

Here's a story on a board game based on and entitled Doom: The Board Game. This is apparently not breaking news, but I just heard about and got a chuckle over it a few days ago. But hey, I think it might make a neato gift for those diehard doom series lovers, or those who wished they could have played doom3 but couldn't swing the hardware upgrade! Get yours here!

Seems Mr. Gates is at it again with saying one thing while trying to cleverly conceal his jabs at Linux. This time speaking of interoperability amongst differing architectures while stating that doesn't mean open source as open source is detrimental to interoperability. Does that seem backwards to anyone else besides me? This is posted all over the net, but here's one reference at Betanews.

Devices: Aaeon, Corvalent, and Renesas Electronics

Aaeon’s COM-KBUC6 is a COM Express Type 6 Compact module with “Kaby Lake” Core-U CPUs, 5x PCIe, 12x USB, and 3x SATA III.
Aaeon has revised its Intel 6th Gen Core based COM-SKUC6 COM Express Type 6 Compact module, which we covered in brief in 2015 as part of Intel’s Skylake announcement, as a new “Kaby Lake” based COM-KBUC6. As you can see from a comparison of the side by side block diagrams below, not much has changed with the new COM-KBUC6 module except for a jump to slightly faster 7th Gen Core processors, once again using the dual-core, 15W U-Series.

Renesas has launched its RZ/G Linux Platform with the industrial-grade Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) Super Long-Term Support (SLTS) Linux kernel, which enables Linux-based embedded systems to be maintained for more than 10 years.

Red Hat and Servers: India, China, Docker and Kubernetes

The open source software company Red Hat is betting big on the Indian market and plans to take its offerings to tier-2 and tier-3 cities as well as neighbouring Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, as public and private sectors increasingly adopt open source software.

In an effort expose its customers to open source solutions, Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, has entered into a new partnership with Red Hat, a global provider of open source solutions.
In addition becoming part of the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider program, Alibaba Cloud will soon be able to offer its clients access to Red Hat's offerings, which includes the full range of open source cloud solutions, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The latter will be offered as a pay-as-you-go model in the Alibaba Cloud Marketplace.

First, ask yourself if you will dedicate the server to Docker containers. If a distribution will only serve up Docker containers, examine the Linux variants created for the specific purpose of deploying containers.

Kubernetes’ perceived edge in the container orchestration market, as young as that market is today, is neither definitive nor definite. Its survival may yet depend on competitors’ ability to match customers’ expectations for the essential requirements for orchestration. In the future, enterprises may look for solutions that are bundled or included with larger platforms, or they may simply accept those solutions once they’ve discovered they were already bundled with the platforms in which they’ve already invested.

GNOME: LVFS and Epiphany

Nearly 100 million files are downloaded from the LVFS every month, the majority being metadata to know what updates are available. Although each metadata file is very small it still adds up to over 1TB in transfered bytes per month. Amazon has kindly given the LVFS a 2000 USD per year open source grant which more than covers the hosting costs and any test EC2 instances. I really appreciate the donation from Amazon as it allows us to continue to grow, both with the number of Linux clients connecting every hour, and with the number of firmware files hosted. Before the grant sometimes Red Hat would pay the bandwidth bill, and other times it was just paid out my own pocket, so the grant does mean a lot to me. Amazon seemed very friendly towards this kind of open source shared infrastructure, so kudos to them for that.
At the moment the secure part of the LVFS is hosted in a dedicated Scaleway instance, so any additional donations would be spent on paying this small bill and perhaps more importantly buying some (2nd hand?) hardware to include as part of our release-time QA checks.

Epiphany 3.27.1 was released a short time ago as the first development release of this web-browser for the GNOME 3.28 cycle.
For being early in the development cycle there is already a fair number of improvements with Epiphany 3.27.1. Some of the highlights include Google Safe Browsing support, a new address bar dropdown powered by libdazzle, and improvements to the Flatpak support.

I am pleased to announce that Epiphany users will now benefit from a safe browsing support which is capable to detect and alert users whenever they are visiting a potential malicious website. This feature will be shipped in GNOME 3.28, but those who don’t wish to wait that long can go ahead and build Epiphany from master to benefit from it.
The safe browsing support is enabled by default in Epiphany, but you can always disable it from the preferences dialog by toggling the checkbox under General -> Web Content -> Try to block dangerous websites.